your friendly neighborhood hypocrite

(note: link-media-spliced with a variety of material in both good and bad taste, depending on your taste-meter. additional note: best usage of this post is to read it through and then go clicking. Did I really need to tell you that, savvy blog-readers?)

I'm well-schooled in TV paranoia... when I was a kid, they even had those ads during Saturday morning cartoons of a boy becoming a couch potato, literally, and growling, "Leave me alone, just let me groove with my tube!" Self-reflexive criticism... weird... like the cigarette companies' anti-smoking campaigns or malls that commission Barbara Kruger. But, hey. The hypocrisy runs large and small. I can't live up to my ideals when it comes to my kids or myself. My TV is the computer. It has the same brain-sucking capacity. And even though PBS kids is mercifully free of the gross ad-glut of the other stations, it still sells things to my boys. And as many moratoriums (moratoria? Either way, it just means a pause, but sounds like a mausoleum to me-- kill your television!) as I call, they still have more screen-time than I want them to have. My devil's advocate side says, "...but aren't these also partially the languages that my kids will inherit? Isn't there a linguistic and technological fluency in storytelling and information transfer by wire and flicker?" My picture of childhood is dominated by all of the pleasurable hours I spent exploring outside, but I also have deep etches of 321 Contact, Electric Company, Sesame Street and many other media memories (tell me those songs aren't deeply groovy?). The place of commodity and consumerism is the rub that I can't get out from under, though, both in reality and in my inner moralist. Check this out (heady alert):

"Whereas during the primitive stage of capitalist accumulation 'political economy considers the proletarian only as a worker,' who only needs to be allotted the indispensable minimum for maintaining his labor power, and never considers him 'in his leisure and humanity,' this ruling-class perspective is revised as soon as commodity abundance reaches a level that requires an additional collaboration from him. Once his workday is over, the worker is suddenly redeemed from the total contempt toward him that is so clearly implied by every aspect of the organization and surveillance of production, and finds himself seemingly treated like a grownup, with a great show of politeness, in his new role as a consumer. At this point the humanism of the commodity takes charge of the worker’s 'leisure and humanity' simply because political economy now can and must dominate those spheres as political economy. The 'perfected denial of man' has thus taken charge of all human existence."
Guy Debord (Society of the Spectacle)

And this, brothers and sisters, is the creep creepy feeling I get with increasing intensity when I see flashing banner ads and sexy car commercials with good songs and billboards and magazines and t-shirts. Yikes! I guess we keep fighting the good fight, in stages and degrees. Limit, screen, fast?